


in the bleak midwinter

by 100indecisions



Series: Video game fanworks [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Gen, Holidays, POV Female Character, holiday fluff in Fallout?, it's more likely than you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:27:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/pseuds/100indecisions
Summary: Seasons and holidays don't mean much to someone who's spent her whole life inside Vault 101. Out in the Capital Wasteland, it's a different story.





	in the bleak midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who wrote 99% of this at the beginning of the month, when it would have been more seasonally appropriate, and never got around to typing and posting it until now? Not me, obviously, that would be...very silly. 
> 
> This fic was inspired by a Twitter thread about winter holidays and the "halfway out of the dark" line in the Doctor Who episode "A Christmas Carol," the [extremely cute winter decorations in Fallout Shelter](https://geekdad.com/2015/12/a-merry-fallout-shelter-christmas/), and the wonderful [Christmas-in-the-Wasteland fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5447195) I received for Yuletide a few years ago (much longer and more detailed than mine, so go give it a read). I'm also making some assumptions about various things that are never actually shown in-game, like weather patterns and the ethnic/religious makeup of Wasteland residents, but they seem like reasonable assumptions to me.

In Vault 101, everybody celebrated birthdays. Sometimes people had parties, especially at major milestones, because it was fun to do something different for a change. But there were other holidays too—the 4th of July and others like it mostly meant even more walls than usual were draped with American flags and the Overseer gave a short speech about duty and patriotism. At the end of the year, there always seemed to be something going on. Most of the celebrations weren’t official vault-sanctioned holidays, but there was an old artificial Christmas tree the vault’s inhabitants set up every year in the atrium with a Vault-Tec branded star on top (the ornaments were always a weird mix of official Vault-Tec stuff and handmade creations that varied wildly in quality). People exchanged gifts then too, which was the main thing Lissa noticed when she was little.

When she was a little bit older, she realized some of the kids were celebrating different holidays that didn’t involve Christmas trees. At this point she can’t remember how old she was when it first occurred to her to wonder why so many similar holidays came during the same time of year, some of them even on top of each other. She does remember that she asked her dad about it, because she was still young enough to assume he knew everything (and young enough to think he’d always told her the truth, but that belief lasted a lot longer).

“Well,” he started, “there are a lot of old pre-War holidays people still like to celebrate—”

“I know _that_ ,” Lissa said, because she was also old enough to think she knew almost everything. “Why are they basically all in the same month? It’s silly. People should spread them out and get presents all year.”

“Oh,” Dad said. His expression did something she couldn’t identify then, that wasn’t exactly sadness but was something like it, and for a very long time she didn’t know what made him look like that. “Before the War—long before that, even, probably as long as people have been alive—most cultures developed midwinter holidays.”

“Okay, so?” she said.

“I’m not finished,” Dad said patiently. “You’ve only known life underground, so things like seasons, or even day and night, are pretty arbitrary to you. We mark time that way because it’s what we’ve always done, but down here, you don’t see sunrises or sunsets or the changing seasons.”

“We read about that stuff in school,” Lissa said, feeling vaguely insulted. “I’ve seen pictures.”

“Sure,” Dad said, “but you haven’t lived it. You don’t, when you’re in a vault, so it’s hard to imagine. You’ve never been outside at night in the middle of nowhere, with only the stars and maybe the moon for light, or…had to think about the weather, or anything like that. But outside, that’s normal, and that’s how things were for thousands of years. Hard winters in particular could kill people, and even when winter wasn’t so dangerous, it was still dark and cold, and sometimes it felt like it would never end. So—people found reasons to celebrate. Christmas, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Yule, the New Year, especially the solstice to celebrate the return of the sun, they’re all ways to shine a little light into the darkness and say, look, we’re still here. We’re making it. The sun is coming back and nothing is as dead as it seems. We’re halfway out of the dark.”

Lissa thought about that for a few seconds, shrugged, and ran off to find Amata. It still seemed silly to make such a big deal out of anything on a calendar, especially seasons that couldn’t possibly be all that different.

Outside Vault 101, it makes a lot more sense. Seasons in the Capital Wasteland aren’t quite as sharply defined as they are in some places, or like they were before the war when things really grew; Lissa still hasn’t seen any of that in person, but she’s talked to people who have, and it’s easier to imagine now that she lives in the Wasteland herself. After all, just like Dad said, nothing in Vault 101 ever changed. Days and nights and seasons were all purely arbitrary, based on instructions handed down from the surface. Outside, the clock and the calendar mean something because they mark actual, physical change.

The Wasteland becomes even more dangerous after dark, as the temperature drops, deadly animals come out of hiding, and raiders use the cover of night to ambush anyone still wandering. Spring and summer mean better brahmin weather, both taking care of them and running caravans with them, but summer can also mean waves of heat and bloatflies, and the insides of shitty metal shacks turning into ovens. Autumn doesn’t mean harvest anymore, not the way a few of the Underworld ghouls say it used to, but some tough little plants still grow in the Wasteland and that’s when everybody stocks up, finally getting some reward from the months of tending and guarding Megaton’s scrappy little garden outside the walls.

Winter, though—that can be rough. Even normal winters get cold enough to require bundling up, and hunting gets tougher as most of the reasonably edible animals go to ground. It’s dark most of the time, and lots of caravans either don’t run at all or stick to much shorter routes, which isn’t a big problem in Megaton but can be a major concern in more remote settlements. Sometimes the pipes freeze, forcing everyone in town to do their business outside the walls, occasionally in strict groups when raider activity is high. Shitty metal shacks become iceboxes that make their inhabitants painfully aware of every crack letting the wind inside. Some years they get storms, Lissa learns—blizzards that reduce visibility to near zero and keep everyone inside the town walls, or ice storms that blanket everything in irradiated ice and seal the gates shut. A couple people in town are missing toes or fingers from times they got desperate enough to go out scavenging and were caught in a storm, and they’re the lucky ones; everybody knows somebody who knows somebody whose cousin elsewhere in the Wasteland went out in a blizzard and was never seen again. Those types of stories tend to have wildly varying levels of accuracy, but in this case it seems reasonable. Lissa herself has found the occasional isolated shitty metal shack occupied by corpses who apparently took shelter there from a storm, got trapped inside by snow drifts or ice, and either ran out of supplies or froze to death.

This is only Lissa’s second winter in Megaton so far, and if the weather’s been relatively mild for the area, it’s dark and chilly enough to make her very, very glad the person who built her house knew something about insulation. At least Megaton, scrapheap that it is, has been around long enough that all of its patchwork buildings have some type of insulation, but there are always regular repairs to be done when everything thaws and preparations to make each year before winter sets in again.

But in midwinter, they still celebrate. Even more strings of lights go up across Megaton, inside and out, all over the houses and walkways. The Brass Lantern breaks out hot mutfruit cider. Nobody can really put up Christmas trees, but there’s always at least one family who hauls in a bush for their kids to decorate. There’s no shortage of material, either—paper from ruined books can be cut into snowflakes, stars can be cut out of used cans and old lunchboxes, and even spent shotgun shells can be strung together to make colorful garlands. People save caps all year to buy gifts from traders, and demand for candles goes up across the Wasteland for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. There’s always at least one meal that’s a little more special and the whole town gets into it, coming together at the Brass Lantern to share real coffee or Fancy Lads Snack Cakes or even the occasional fresh apple.

Lissa spends a lot of time wandering the Wasteland, still, even in winter; she knows what she’s doing and she has Dogmeat for backup, and it didn’t take long for Moira to begin relying on the extra supplies Lissa brings in. But she finds she spends more time in Megaton during the winter anyway—more time curled up with Dogmeat in her armchair, reading every undamaged book she finds before setting them aside for Scribe Yearling at the Citadel, or hauling a blanket up to her roof on New Year’s Eve so she has a good vantage point for the fireworks (always set off at a safe distance from town, at the sheriff’s insistence).

Life in Vault 101 was easier and safer—but out here, under the open sky, there’s something more like freedom, and every year she gets to see people stubbornly making a little light in the dark. There’s a kind of magic about it, about every small act of defiant hope she sees. It’s a magic she never could have understood if she’d never left the vault, never had the chance to see a town made of scraps gleaming with hundreds of multicolored lights on the coldest, darkest, most dangerous days of the year.

War never changes, they say, and Lissa supposes that’s true—but people never change either, and that doesn’t only mean violence. It means hand-whittled dreidels and scavenged toys and wreaths made of scrub brush and a fireworks show to rival Rivet City’s. It means the end of the world wasn’t quite the end of the world. It means celebrating the simple act of making it through another winter.

Halfway out of the dark. She gets it now.


End file.
